Last week, Vice-President Mike Pence announced the Trump administration’s
plan for a new military command, the US Space Force,
emphasizing President Donald Trump’s urging that “It is not enough to
merely have an American presence in space: we must have
American dominance in space.” Pence’s announcement was
greeted by Trump, tweeting in response, “Space Force all the way!”

Pence’s rationale for this disturbing
expansion of US militarization to the heavens is that “our
adversaries”, Russia and China, “have been working to
bring new weapons of war into space itself” that pose a
threat to American satellites. But despite a virtual
blackout in the mainstream media, Russia and China have
been arguing for years in the halls of the United Nations
that the world needs a treaty to prevent stationing such
weapons in outer space in order to maintain global
“strategic stability” among the major powers and enable
nuclear disarmament. Although the Outer Space
Treaty of 1967 prevented the placement of weapons of mass destruction in outer space, it never prohibited
conventional weapons in space.
In 2008 and again
in 2014, Russia and China introduced a draft Treaty on
the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space
in the UN forum that negotiates disarmament agreements,
the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. The U.S. has
blocked any discussion of the space weapons ban treaty in
the consensus-bound forum, where all talks are stalled
because of U.S. repeated vetoes. After years of inaction,
we now learn that
Russia and China are believed to be developing the ability
to shoot down satellites in space.

We reach this point after a sad history of missed
opportunities for peace in space and nuclear disarmament.
It began with President Truman’s rejection of Stalin’s
proposal to place the bomb under international control at
the United Nations in 1946. Then President Reagan rejected
former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s offer to
eliminate nuclear weapons, provided the U.S. didn’t
proceed with his plan for Star Wars, a space-based
military system, later described in 1997 under the Clinton
administration, as the US Space Command’s Vision 2020,
proclaiming its mission to “dominate and control the
military use of space to protect U.S. interests and
investments.” Clinton rejected Putin’s offer to reduce our
massive nuclear arsenals of some 15,000 bombs each to
1,000 and then call on all the other nuclear weapons
states to negotiate for their abolition, conditioned on
the U.S. halting its plans to put anti-missile systems in
Eastern Europe. President George W. Bush, relying on his
policy to include missile defense and space-based weapons
to destroy targets anywhere in the world swiftly for “full
spectrum dominance,” walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic
Missile treaty that the U.S. had negotiated with the
Soviet Union and now
there are U.S. missiles in Romania and others planned
for installation in Poland. Further, President Obama
rejected Putin’s offer in 2006, in light of a new kind of
arms race with potentially dangerous consequences, to
negotiate an international treaty to ban cyber attacks.

Last March, President Putin, in his State of the Nation
Address, said he would speak about “the newest
systems of Russian strategic weapons that we are creating
in response to the unilateral withdrawal of the United
States of America from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
and the practical deployment of their missile defence
systems both in the U.S. and beyond their national
borders.” He went on to say:

Back in 2000, the US
announced its withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty. Russia was categorically against this. We saw the
Soviet-US ABM Treaty signed in 1972 as the cornerstone of
the international security system….. Together with the
Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the ABM Treaty not only
created an atmosphere of trust but also prevented either
party from recklessly using nuclear weapons, which would
have endangered humankind, because the limited number of
ballistic missile defence systems made the potential
aggressor vulnerable to a response strike.

We did our best to
dissuade the Americans from withdrawing from the treaty.
All in vain. (emphasis added). The US pulled out
of the treaty in 2002. Even after that we tried to develop
constructive dialogue with the Americans. We proposed
working together in this area to ease concerns and
maintain the atmosphere of trust... All our proposals,
absolutely all of them, were rejected. And then we said
that we would have to improve our modern strike systems to
protect our security

There has been a shocking failure to report on the
repeated proposals from Russia and China to negotiate a
treaty to prevent the terrible possibility that the United
States is stirring up an arms race that could destroy our
extended use of global positioning satellites to gather
critical information for both peaceful and military
purposes. A careful and honest examination of the
historical record can only lead to the conclusion of Walt
Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

Alice Slater serves on the Coordinating Committee
of World Beyond War, is a CODEPINK affiliate, and
represents the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at the United
Nations.